Dostoevsky's drama Humiliated and Insulted, advertised at the façade of the Volksbühne (People's Theatre) on Rosa-Luxemburg-Square in (OST) EAST Berlin — reflecting the mood of nostalgic socialists/communists in the East. West Berlin had the Freie Volksbühne (Free People's Theatre).

Berlin's signature building — the Brandenburg Gate — was right behind the wall and off-limits for West-Berliners. While drinking in a typical West Berlin bar (Stube = living room) one could fantasize about accessing it. But the angels in Wim Wenders's movie Himmel über Berlin / Wings of Desire could cross the wall with ease.

Nowadays there are two choices to see Berlin from above. In the plane of the Fuehrer, the Junkers 52, or in an airlift DC 3, used to bring supply (and candy) to West Berliners during the blockade in 1948–49.

Virtual doorbells at Magdeburger Platz 4 — Benjamin's birthplace —depicting names of tenants and Benjamin scholars. Created for the porch of a Benjamin exhibition at the Haus am Waldsee, the enlarged doorbell was built into the façade, welcoming visitors at the entrance, connecting space and time.

Places of Remembrance, memorial, Berlin, 1993 Stih & Schnock

We created this memory walk memorial for the more than 6,000 Jews who were deported from this part of town, an area where Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Gertrud Kolmar, Gisele Freund and Carl Einstein had lived before the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Map on JFK Square, placed in front of the former town hall of West Berlin, connecting the Bavarian Quarter in Berlin Schöneberg in 1933 and1993, listing the 80 double-sided text/image signs. There are two more maps right at Bayerischer Platz and in front of the former Werner Siemens Realgymnasium on Münchener Straße.

Places of Remembrance, memorial, Berlin 1993 Stih & Schnock

Two of 80 signs attached to street light poles. The texts are condensed versions of anti-Jewish laws and regulations passed from 1933 to 1945, corresponding in numerous ways with the colored images on the reverse side.

Image: File; text on the reverse side: "All files dealing with anti-Semitic activities are to be destroyed. February 16, 1945." (In the background: "Rubber Stamp"; back: "Jewish civil servants may no longer serve the State. April 7, 1933.")

Places of Remembrance, memorial, Berlin, 1993 Stih & Schnock

Image: Cat; text: "Jews are no longer allowed to have household pets. February 15, 1942."

East Berlin City Map+Guide from 1989, in German/English/French/Russian.

West Berlin is depicted as nowhere land, East Berlin "secured" behind the wall.

top Wall remnant next to Topography of Terror, on the spot of former Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, Himmler's headquarter. Left: former Nazi air force headquarter (arch. Ernst Sagebiel 1934–35).

below Wall line in front of Martin-Gropius-Bau (exhibition venue; former arts+crafts museum).

below "Urban flair" at Potsdamer Platz, including temporary follies like a ski slope and a X-mas market.

topMemorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Peter Eisenman, 1998–2005 — with some input from Richard Serra and the former German chancellor Helmut Kohl), view from the China club; in the background, Potsdamer Platz area. The West Berlin discussion about how and where to put the Holocaust Memorial took several years, then the wall came down. Berlin became capital of reunited Germany; the former intense public discourse was transformed into concrete blocks. Now it's located in front of the American Embassy, close by the Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag.

below Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism, by Elmgreen+Dragset (2008); located in Tiergarten, right across from the Holocaust memorial.

Tourist sightseeing stop: Holocaust Memorial

The Stih & Schnock competion entry, BUS STOP, is an active memorial — remembering the victims of Nazism by going to the former concentration camps and connecting memory sites and places of evidence as constant reminders. Berlin, 1994.

The new Berlin, seen from above (2009); foreground, left: The Flick Collection

Gretchen collects for the Flick Collection, 2004, Stih & Schnock

Art and protest activities (billboards, publications, flyers, public discussion) to force the heir and grandson of the late Friedrich Flick, an industrialist who exploited 50,000 slave workers, to pay compensations into the forced laborers fund.

"The Art of Collecting: Flick in Berlin," Berlin, 2004 Stih & Schnock

top Billboards on trucks passing the office of chancellor Schroeder, a strong supporter of the Friedrich Christian Flick deal.

below Billboards next to the Flick-exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof

Ads for Berlin's self-help groups on 32 billboards, 1998. Extending an invitation towards the whole society, beyond the usual art circles, we created a half-year-long forum for social philanthropy by working together with East and West Berlin self-help groups.

View from Leipziger Strasse towards Leipziger Platz and Potsdamer Platz: an area in the making. Construction sites are an attraction and a popular destination for visitors in town, widely advertised by the Berlin Senat.

Fake buildings with printed facades on canvas are spread all over the city, suggesting how they might have looked and will look when eventually realized one day. Several of these constructed tents cover empty lots, turning precious urban space into theatrical settings. Advertisements give them a surplus layer to finance the time-limited constructions.

top Unter den Linden in 1993, view towards the Deutsches Historisches Museum /German Historical Museum on the left, on the right the Kronprinzessinnenpalais. Center/background: the temporary simulation of the former Stadtschloss (Royal Palace) next to the white building, the former GDR Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

below The vanishing East German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1995. Schinkel's Building Academy (Bauakademie 1831–35) had to be demolished for that GDR prefab highrise in 1961–62. Right behind it: Schinkel's Gothic revival church Friedrichwerdersche Kirche, 1825.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel's programmatic Building Academy was the most modern construction of its time, connecting education and business.

The communist Government erased it in 1961–1962 in order to erect the Foreign Office of the German Democratic Republic on this lot. Again, this building was demolished after reunification in 1995–96. The Association for the Promotion of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Building Academy initiated the reconstruction of this precious architectural and cultural monument.

Schinkel's Building Academy reappeared as a temporary structure, without pointing out the former shops on the first floor. In July 2009 Stih & Schnock added signs on those empty shop windows to indicate the former stores of Jewish tailors. Berlin's fashion industry moved later on to Hausvogteiplatz, just around the corner.

Some historic buildings, like the former Nazi Reichsbank, underwent a significant transcription. This one became the headquarter of East Germany's Communist party, and was then transformed into the new German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. An extension building by Müller/Reimann was added to it in 1997–99. (see image below).

top Stih & Schnock, Haensel & Gretel and the Gold in the Reichsbank, competition entry 1998; part 1, entrance area: neon outline of the former Nazi bird-of-prey, telling the "golden" history of that institution during the Third Reich.

part 2, "Haensel & Gretel sculpture," on the roof top next to the German flag. A smaller version was designed for all desks in the offices of the German Foreign Ministry.

View North towards the Schlossbrücke /Palace Bridge (K.F. Schinkel, 1822–24), German Historical Museum and Museum Island. The bridge is framed by two buildings with a strong photographic background: to the left, the Bertelsmann Foundation, Unter den Linden 1, a Classicist remake, created from just one photograph. On the other side, Berlin's temporary contemporary exhibition space, a box structure, covered with reflections/depictions of the Palace of the Republic, the meanwhile demolished former communist pleasure dome (an installation by B. Pousttchi in 2009).

Stih & Schnock, competition entry for the Memorial of Freedom and Unification (2009). Set between the reconstructed palace façade and the Building Academy, Stih & Schnock proposed a meeting site for singing groups, installing next to it an archive of revolutionary German songs on a steamboat called Unity.

top The GDR Ministry of Foreign Affairs is gone; Karl Friedrich Schinkel on a pedestal is looking North (2005).

below Deconstruction in progress, Palace of the Republic in 2006.

top View across the Palace Bridge towards the remnants of the Palace of the Republic (2008).

below The socialist palace is gone; a billboard depicts the future palace. Historic façades will contain the Humboldt Forum.

top Germany – Land of Ideas / Deutschland – Land der Ideen was a "nation-branding initiative" in 2006, a public-private partnership project, "promoting Germany's reputation."

The enlarged headache/sleeping pill, placed next to the Reichstag was part of its sculptural output. Is it a symbol for IG Farben, the world's largest chemical company in Nazi Germany until its dissolution by the Allies after World War II?

below Opera square, now called Bebelplatz, in front of the Humboldt University: Another "Land of Ideas – Land der Ideen" site, with a pile of books placed next to Micha Ullman's central memorial, commemorating the May 1933 Nazi book burning. An invasion of "Berlin Bears" surrounded the scenery.

This memorial hasn't been considered yet: the Memorial for Foreign Workers, euphemistically called guest workers/Gastarbeiter. After 1945 European migrant workers like Italians, Croats, Portuguese, Greeks, Spaniards and Turks were instrumental in creating West-German's Wirtschaftswunder / economic miracle.

During the Cold War, East and West exchanged their captured spies on Glienicker Brücke, the so-called bridge of spies. Crossing into East Germany from West Berlin, you were limited to just a few transit routes, for a specified period of time, and you couldn’t leave the track and couldn’t visit anyone in the East without a permit.

West Berliners led a free life, in a part of a city surrounded by a wall. East Berliners were imprisoned inside the Eastern Bloc, and because they couldn’t travel anywhere they wanted to, they were disconnected from the constant flow of information, exchange and influences. This explains why Westerners and Easterners have different collective memories; they even speak the same language in a different way.

In November 1989 the wall came down, and West and East Germans began rediscovering each other; but the socialist and capitalist cultures have been slow to merge. Since reunification Germany has been searching for new patterns of self-recognition. Until the World Soccer Games — in 2006 — Germans felt unable to wave their flag — part of the burden of Germany’s inglorious past, recalling the darkest epoch in European history, the Holocaust and World War II. The past remains present. History and memory are kept alive in schools, research centers and memorials, and also by Germany’s public and private media. The debates about the Holocaust Memorial ended in concrete, and the traces of the wall that once ruled the lives of Berliners are mostly erased. It’s a delicate balance, to retell the complex story it symbolized.

Throughout Berlin the histories of sites, people and buildings create multiple overlays; street names are changed overnight, structures are reshaped and reborn. Newcomers find the empty spaces inviting, ready to be conquered. What they cannot know is the fantastic feeling of freedom that you once had when driving down the Avus into West Berlin after crossing the border. Young men came to West Berlin to avoid being drafted; many citizens moved to that enclosed island to get far away from their small-town families, hungry for knowledge, art, music, literature, theatre, movies, sex and nights at the Jungle club. The former stronghold of the student revolution has been turned into a capital for punks, who listened to the band Einstürzende Neubauten — Collapsing New Buildings — while the union-owned real estate company Neue Heimat tore down entire blocks to reshape parts of the West to look like prefabricated socialist housing in the East. When the federal government moved from Bonn to the new/old capital, another building boom started, and the new arrivals transformed the gray tristesse of the East into a hip place for young baby boomers, just like at home in Cologne or Stuttgart. But the reunified Berlin is still big enough to absorb a lot. It still provides open spaces for everybody — places without borders — “chacun a son gout,” in the spirit of Frederick the Great.

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Futuristic control rooms with endless screens of blinking data are proliferating in cities across the globe. Welcome to the age of Dashboard Governance.

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Past Discussions View

john massengale

11.11.2009 at 11:40

I was in Berlin the weekend after the wall came down. I had never been to Berlin, and on my first day I went to see Schinkel's Kleine Glienecke — by the Glienecke bridge, which had a constant stream of East Germans walking into West Berlin. It was quite a sight.

On Sunday, we went to a cafe which had a famous all-you-can-eat buffet. The West Germans and tourists were diving in, but the East Germans made a circle around the buffet tables, standing 2 meters away from the tables. They had paid for the meal with the allowance they got when they entered West Berlin, but seemingly couldn't believe they were allowed to partake.

Easily noticeable was that many of the young men had spent a large portion of their stipends on pornographic magazines. Ah, the wonderful West.

I made my way back to Munich by train via Potsdam, Leipzig and Weimar. I had to go into East Berlin by subway to get a visa for the trip. When you got off the train, the station was shabby, dirty and poorly lit. Soldiers in gray uniforms stood around with machine guns and German Shepherds, watching the crowd. It was a grim and depressing introduction to what humans are willing to do to each other in the name of "equality."

The next day I went back to visit Potsdam. Potsdam is at one end of the Glienecke bridge, but I had to go to a central station and then to a railroad that rings the city, transforming a potentially short walk into a trip that took a few hours.

The trains were again shabby and poorly lit. Without announcement, we would pull into badly marked stations and people would run to and fro, exiting and entering trains on adjacent tracks. Luckily, I saw a sign for Potsdam and got off the train. Other trains pulled out, and I was left standing on an empty platform.

I walked into the station building, which had temporary construction walls that looked like they had been left untouched for a decade. A man walked out of the gloom in one corner of the station and asked me in English if I wanted a taxi. I was too dumb to say "yes," and went to the ticket window to find out how to get to my hotel.

I had been living in Munich for a few months and knew some German, but I got nowhere with the ticket seller. He pointed to a sign for trams to the center of the town, but when I telephoned my hotel — the best in Potsdam — to find out how to get from the tram to the hotel, no one answered the phone at the hotel.

I went to a taxi stand. Every time a taxi pulled in, a rugby scrum would run to the driver and yell things at him. He would point to a few people, they would get in the taxi, the taxi would leave and the scrum would disperse.

Down the street, I spotted a some parked taxis. The drivers of those taxis were having dinner and weren't interested in communicating. I went back to the taxi stand and eventually realized that dollar bills would probably get me a private taxi. The driver may have grossly overcharged me, but since I only gave him $2 I wasn't concerned.

As we drove into Potsdam, it was dark. Few streetlights were lit, and most houses had their shutters drawn against the cold. Almost all the buildings still had what seemed to be bomb marks from World War II, and the stench of coal was overwhelming. I later learned that coal was the main source of power and heat for most things, including cars, and that it was a particularly noxious and toxic coal.

The hotel was a beautiful if somewhat grim English country in a park, designed for a Crown Prince by Muthesius. But even after several hours in Potsdam, when I woke up in the middle of the night in my beautiful and comfortable room, my first thought was "the coal stinks."

When I got away from Potsdam to Leipzig and Weimar, it was hard to tell that anything had changed in East Germany. No one was willing to talk to me about what was going on in Berlin, with the exception of a very old couple in Weimar, whom I guessed thought they were too old to get into trouble.

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